


other sands

by d0ng_y0ung (justawks)



Series: boylog [3]
Category: The Boyz (Korea Band)
Genre: Affection, Alcohol, Canon Compliant, Drinking, Holding Hands, Introspection, M/M, Mutual Pining, Okinawa Boyz, Pre-Relationship, Vacation, q being drunk and in love on a beach? more likely than u would think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24735694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justawks/pseuds/d0ng_y0ung
Summary: Changmin finds himself leaning back against a warm chest, feels his own chest expand with emotion. They are rocking side to side, gently, and Jacob is yelling “smile!” and then they are posing, eyes wide in the camera flash.or, Changmin goes to Okinawa, gets drunk on a beach, and falls in love (not necessarily in that order).
Relationships: Ji Changmin | Q/Kim Sunwoo
Series: boylog [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1793686
Comments: 8
Kudos: 88





	other sands

**Author's Note:**

> Sunwoo has been posting lots of throwbacks on twitter which reminded me of [these](https://twitter.com/sunqpage/status/1272394126030336001?s=20) photos of the Okinawa boyz looking blasted out of their minds on a beach which reminded me of [these](https://twitter.com/sunqpage/status/1272391865665388544?s=20) photos of Sunu and Changmin and let's just say this wrote itself. As always, some dialogue/setting/plot taken from [Changmin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6V0JJCMz90), [Jacob](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glEyyCNWyDY), and [Younghoon's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5WIcody0ss) BOYLOG videos. (this is all fiction tho). 
> 
> Rated T for drinking :)
> 
> **uhh rtk spoilers** 
> 
> let's go tbz world domination! a much-deserved rtk win!!

There’s a strange sort of giddiness that comes from being alone and unsupervised at the airport. Changmin often takes the train home alone during most of their longer vacation periods, but he honestly can’t remember the last time he flew without a full team of company staff and most if not all of his members alongside him. The long lines and the carefully orchestrated dance of passports here, baggage here, _run or we’ll miss the flight_ usually provide him with a strange sort of comfort; to be without that routine makes him feel a little naked, a little exposed.

It is nearly 4:00 am yet Incheon is full of life. The inky black sky has twisted into the sort of pearlescent blue that signals an incoming sunrise by the time they check their bags and make it through security. Sunwoo is pushy, eager—he wants sunglasses and maybe some expensive booze from Duty Free now that no managers are here to stop him and, as far as they can tell, no fans or “fans” have figured out their flight plans. 

Sunwoo is dressed in an oversized suit and pageboy cap, lips coated in cherry-colored gloss and eyes a little puffy from the early-morning van ride. Changmin doesn’t usually feel old around Sunwoo, but he does now; feels like the tortoise watching the back of the hare as it sprints away, feels like a wave endlessly chasing after the shore. Sunwoo leads them eagerly through the airport to their gate, posing for pictures and videos and offering to film or photograph in exchange. Changmin knows that Sunwoo has always loved the documentation of their lives as idols, has always said that it feels like something tangible in a life governed by such intangible things such as “popularity” or “success.”

They make it to the gate with time to spare, so Changmin and Jacob head off to purchase breakfast for everyone. This part feels routine; they are far too familiar with the food offerings in this wing of the airport and know each member’s order by heart. 

Everyone is hungry in that strange, early-morning way, so they finish their food in record time. They’re eagerly preparing to board, gathering up boarding passes and bags and empty breakfast dishes, when the voice comes over the loudspeaker informing them that boarding will be delayed for a few moments. They all sigh and sink back down onto the vinyl chairs while Changmin pulls the vlog camera out. The company had been pretty clear that they didn’t _have_ to film their vacation, but everyone agreed that this is exactly the sort of thing the fans would want to see. 

(Privately, Changmin wants the footage for himself, wants to be able to sear the images of freedom and vacation and optimism on the backs of his eyelids in case everything takes a turn someday down the road—for better or for worse.) 

“Our flight has been delayed.” He pouts into the camera, hoping his expression comes out well. “We have to wait 5 to 10 minutes, probably.”

Jacob is slurping on his smoothie next to him, and the soft pitter-patter of rain is just audible over the early-morning buzz of the airport. Changmin is warm in his scarf-and-coat combo. The giddiness has settled into something more manageable now. 

Sunwoo leans over into his space. It takes Changmin a second too long to realize he wants to talk to the camera, and he shifts the lens so it’s facing the younger man. “I’m hearing that the weather is going to be cloudy in Okinawa,” Sunwoo pouts into the camera. “What a relief that that isn’t today; it’s going to be cloudy tomorrow.” 

Changmin nods along. “And on the day after we leave, it’s going to rain,” Sunwoo continues. “This is luck.”

The rain, Changmin thinks, is going to erase their footsteps in the sand. Make it so their trace is gone, make it like they were never there at all. _Is that lucky?_ he thinks to himself. 

“Everytime we go abroad it starts to rain,” he says to the camera. “100% precipitation.”

They board soon after that, navigate the familiar maze of winding halls and escalators and loading ramps. He ends up seated between Sunwoo and the window, caught between the warmth from the press of their shoulders and the chill seeping through the plexiglass pane.

Sunwoo’s been holding in the joke all morning, he knows, so it’s easy to humor him. 

“We’re going to Okinawa, so when I say ‘Come on out’ what will you say?” Sunwoo asks with a barely suppressed grin. 

“Oki!” Changmin offers back, dutiful in his role as a co-joke-maker. No one else on the team takes quite as much pleasure in this particular brand of humor as Sunwoo. (It feels like a gift, Changmin thinks to himself, to be the one to help make him laugh like that.)

They wave goodbye to the camera and the cabin lights go dim. The body of the plane shakes during takeoff, and Changmin almost feels like his mind is shaking alongside it. His thoughts swirl in and out; flights always give him too much time to think, and this one is no exception. He wants to sleep but knows he can’t, so he ends up with his head pillowed on his forearms, an old workout playlist blasting in his ears to keep himself awake. 

As always when he’s feeling existential, his thoughts turn to his career choice. 

The weird thing about spending most of your adolescence preparing for an all-consuming career in show business is that the usual benchmarks tend to get missed, or when they do appear it is only in odd, perverted forms. An example: Changmin doesn’t remember his first kiss, not really, but he does remember the consuming terror he’s felt after every kiss since then—all of which took place after the signing of his trainee contract, with the knowledge that one wrong step, one out-of-context saesang shot, and it was all over hanging over his head like a cloud. Another one: he remembers moving away from home to live in the trainee dorms, remembers the tears on his mom’s cheeks and the odd, wistful look on his noonas’ faces. By the time his childhood friends were nervously preparing for university he had been living beyond his childhood home for years.

Changmin doesn’t go on dates often, and when he does they are never “dates” in the purest sense of the word. Meaning-laden emoticon Kakaotalk messages and “significant” eyebrows and careful coordination around managers and group members and the rumor mill all mean that there’s a heavy deal of guesswork involved. He’s never sure if it’s a just-friends thing or a let’s-meet-again thing or a i’ll-risk-both-our-careers-for-you thing. He tries to enjoy it, to live in the moment, but only so many times can he tolerate the pinched look on everyone’s faces when he comes back to the dorms late at night on a rare weekend off, cheeks flushed and hairline sweaty and t-shirt all crumpled.

Besides, there’s always Sunwoo. 

Sunwoo who is next to him now, next to him always. His rosy-cheeked dongsaeng without a lick of respect. Sunwoo makes him feel alight in the same way dance does, gives him that same sense of home that being with his family provides. It remains unspoken, mostly, but he thinks they have a shared understanding. Desperately hopes they do. 

Against his better judgement, he lets himself sink into an uneasy sleep. 

The sky is big and bright and blue when they finally exit the airport in Okinawa. It’s in the 20s—a shock from the near zero of the early morning Incheon they had left behind. They agree to play tourist in the morning, dropping off their suitcases at the hotel and reveling in the lightness of their shoulders. 

They have noodles for lunch in a mostly empty restaurant sandwiched tightly between neighboring shops. He’d had a Starbucks muffin hours ago at the airport, so the warm broth and chewy noodles are perfectly satisfying to his empty stomach. The rest of the members want souvenirs, he knows, so they head to a nearby character shop to look for appropriate knicknacks. 

It’s time for photos next. The street is bright and clear, the sort of tidy tourist wonder that draws the eye. “It’s so pretty,” he tells the vlog camera, meaning every word. “There are lots of students and kids. It’s great.” 

They all go and buy swimsuits for the beach. Changmin buys those ridiculous fish sandals because he loves the way they make Sunwoo giggle loudly with a wide, toothy smile. 

“This is Q’s cool item,” Sunwoo teases into the camera. “He has fish shoes—”

“They’re comfortable!” Changmin defends, but Sunwoo carries on as if he hadn’t heard him. 

“His coolness has elevated 30%.”

Changmin knows they’re ridiculous—that’s why he bought them. Still, the banter is fun, and it gives them something to do on camera while they trek back to the hotel. “They’re not _that_ noticeable,” he whines. 

“I don’t know about that,” is all the younger man says, with a significant look down at his feet. 

They check into the hotel, one room with two twin beds split between the four of them because this is a _true_ vacation—meaning it’s all on their dime. They strip out of their travel clothes and change into swim trunks and t-shirts, slathering sunscreen on their exposed limbs. Sunwoo takes a shot of the whisky he’d bought at the airport because he’s messy like that, and the four of them spill downstairs and across the street to the small patch of shoreline adjacent to the hotel. 

It’s relatively populated, with a few families and groups of teens lounging on towels. It’s getting into the late afternoon at this point, past the midday peak of sun and warmth. The sun is already creating colored streaks across the sky. 

(Sunwoo glows in the sunlight. He always has. Changmin knows he’s staring, but it has genuinely been months since he’s been free to watch the start of a sunset, always in rehearsal or practice or a meeting or catching up on desperately needed sleep. Sunwoo has this look on his face—contentment, maybe, or ease—and it makes him look young and unburdened. It makes him look _beautiful_. Changmin cannot look away.)

They set their things down before the four of them run straight into the waves. The water is refreshingly cool; it feels like a balm against his aching shoulders and bruised hips. Each roll of the ocean water chips away at his exhausted exterior. Changmin feels raw and rough in the water, like he’s picked a scab clean off. That’s the beauty of vacation: by morning he thinks he will be the pink skin of a healing wound. 

The water quickly loses its appeal as afternoon cools into night. They dry off haphazardly and roll up their towels. A quick stop back at the hotel room and they are off. 

Their next goal is meat, as much as they can buy. They wander along the shoreline, changed out of their suits but not showered, saltwater crystalizing on their skin, until they find a grill shop with an open table. They are seated quickly, Jacob ordering a few platters of meat and a pitcher of beer. 

The food arrives quickly and they send several photos to the group chat, giggling at the jealous responses from their members. They are hungry from the day, though, so they do not delay. 

Time passes quickly at a meal shared with friends. Their shoulders are pressed together, one after one after one, as they swallow mouthful after mouthful of freshly grilled meat. Cold, cheap beer washes it down; rinse and repeat. 

Whenever they do things like this—have blissful moments alone as boys, not as Boyz, out for a messy group dinner or crammed onto the couch in the living room for movie night—Changmin gets this eerie sensation of another life. Would Changmin in university have had friends like this? What if he’d been passed up for debut, or if Chanhee had gone to KQ instead? If Haknyeon had made it into Wanna One? 

The list of possibilities is endless, and he knows it’s fruitless to speculate how things could have gone differently. Still, there’s an odd sort of peace in knowing that, whatever alternatives might exist, he was blessed with _this_ life among them. He always gets too emotional, too melancholy when he thinks for too long about the constant contingency of life; but, then again, that could be the beer talking.

(They are on their third pitcher by now, after all.) 

They pay at the counter once they’re full to bursting, emptying their pockets for the last of the yen they’d converted at a bus station earlier in the day. Walking back to the hotel, bolstered by the presence of three of his favorite people in the world, Changmin feels as though he’s on a cloud. 

His chest feels warm and light, and grows more so once Sunwoo pulls out a small flask of his whiskey. He, Sunwoo, and Jacob pass it between the three of them, giggling over recollections from the long day of travel and exploration. Younghoon follows dutifully behind, shaking his head with each round of raucous laughter. 

They stop back at the beach from earlier, empty now save for an abandoned towel given up to the encroaching tide. Younghoon immediately sits himself on the curb opposite the beach, a safe distance from the saltwater and whatever mischief the more inebriated members might get up to, while Jacob starts combing the sand for shells. That leaves Changmin and Sunwoo standing shoulder-to-shoulder, closer than they probably need to be. Changmin lets himself sag into the support of the younger man. He is tired, so tired, but there’s nowhere he’d rather be in this moment than alongside him. 

The seconds stretch out long and slow. Changmin finds himself swaying slightly to the rhythm of the waves. The salted air stings his tender wounds—metaphorical as they might be. 

Their stillness is interrupted by a shriek and a shower of damp sand. Jacob, ever the role model, turns into some sort of demon when he’s drunk; he has snuck up behind them and launched a clump of sand over their heads. Sunwoo startles, offers his own shriek into the night. Changmin tries to lunge away, but it is dark and he is several drinks in; he finds himself splayed out on the sand. 

Jacob cackles before running off to bother Younghoon. 

(Changmin has always suspected that the older man revels in the way alcohol lets him shirk his image, if only for a moment. No longer the soft-spoken and ever-vigilant oldest, he transforms into an overgrown child.)

Sunwoo pulls him to his feet, brushes sand from his shoulders. They hold their eye contact. That familiar giddiness is back. 

Words are challenging, as they always are; instead, Changmin tries to draw a heart in the sand with his toes, addled mind figuring that this is a very subtle thing to do for your close personal friend and bandmate to say thank you. 

(It turns out that his balance has escaped him for good this time, wobbling ominously. Younghoon makes him sit alongside him on the curb until the world stops spinning, and then he is allowed to pop back up and run towards the water. The water is further then Changmin remembers and the sand shifts wetly under his feet so he quickly abandons that plan.)

He ends up starfished on his back, staring up at the stars and the inky black sky. The water laps at his toes in a way that warns him he’ll need to move eventually or get soaked in saltwater, but for the moment the warm air and soothing gurgle of the waves threaten to lull him to sleep. 

“Hyung,” he hears from above him, and opens his eyes to the welcome sight of drunk Sunwoo, cheeks as ruddy as his hair, smiling softly down at him. “You’ll get all wet and sandy if you stay like that,” the younger says. 

Sunwoo had changed from his blazer into a thicker denim jacket before dinner, the sort of cropped, boxy thing he usually favors. Changmin thinks it makes him look particularly cute—he looks more like himself like this, after all. 

Sunwoo walks around him and offers him a hand. Changmin takes it, and finds himself pulled onto his feet and straight into the younger man’s arms. He’s warm, warmer than the rapidly cooling night air around them, and he smells like his usual cologne diffused with sea air. 

Changmin finds himself nuzzling closer—the sort of thing he doesn’t typically permit himself, but this is a rare moment in a career and lifestyle that is so carefully choreographed. 

Sometimes, he has to take what he can get. 

Somewhere in another world there is another him and another _him_ , and they are on some other version of this very same little patch of beach, except things are different. They are not idols, or at least not trying to be, and they are friends and there is freedom to their movements and freedom to their thoughts. It’s easy—being here with some of their closest friends, tongues and hands a little loose from the beer and the exhausted thrill of vacation—to forget all the heavy things that keep them apart. It’s easy to give in just a little bit.

Changmin finds himself leaning back against a warm chest, feels his own chest expand with emotion. They are rocking side to side, gently, and Jacob is yelling “smile!” and then they are posing, eyes wide in the camera flash. 

He’s a little drunk, yes, and a lot tired, but Changmin swears he can _feel_ all the other hims and the other _hims_ converging at this very moment. On this little strip of beach in Okinawa, the curtain between worlds drops just for a second and Changmin can feel it all. He clutches at Sunwoo’s hand, tries to convey all the little things he sees and feels with the way he curls his fingers against the younger’s warm palm. 

For now, clasped hands in the dark of night and stolen moments when everyone is too drunk to think they really mean it are all they have. But no, that is not true—they have glimpses of other beaches and other selves, after all. Changmin sees the way he and Sunwoo fall together across time and space. 

(Perhaps it is their future he is seeing. Or perhaps it is an impossibility. Only time will tell; after all, nothing about this life has come as it should. )

Tonight, in this version of his life, Changmin tucks himself closer underneath Sunwoo’s chin and feels the wound begin to heal.

**Author's Note:**

> The Okinawa joke, if you are unfamiliar: "Come out" in Korean is 나와 (pronounced na-wa) so "Come out?" + "Oki!" = "Okinawa" lmao yes this is a real joke Sunu and Q made during their vlogs smh
> 
> Thanks for reading! hmu on [twitter](https://twitter.com/cherrryyok) if u wanna. 
> 
> As always, remember than fandom spaces can be productive sites of social change. [Here's](https://daily.jstor.org/institutionalized-racism-a-syllabus/?fbclid=IwAR0XqLV-pRS9aFSazieLHP2nGmRpFryEszsiYsd58qQeErrL6jriPqOFugI) a link to a great collection of readings put together by JSTOR related to institutionalized racism, if you're interested.


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